Anyone here run across these? Any thoughts? I was chatting the other day to someone who explained that many academics have taken to using quite a range of new vocabulary when it comes to defining people's capabilities in languages. Although I do on the one hand understand the need to determine fairly accurately between different levels of knowledge, I think we've have got a neological shambles based on a pseudo science here. This site explains (authoritatively) on..

Your mention of Urdu brought to mind a surprising factoid I picked up from the CIA factbook. I already knew that Urdu, the language taught alongside English at my Dad's alma mater, was a minority language in Pakistan, despite being the official language of the country. What surprised me was how much of a minor language it is there. Many non-Maaori here are upset that a language spoken by, at the very most, 8% of the population should have dual status with English. According to the CIA, that's the percentage of Pakistanis for whom Urdu is their first language. That seems a vfery low percentage for a language designated as the sole official tongue of a nation. On the subject of equilingual, I'm with you and RhubC on this one , or as Steven Wright said, "Im a bilingual illiterate, I can't read and write in two languages."

I was under the impression that Urdu is an artificial lingua franca similar to Esperanto, developed so that communication could take place amongst the many differing cultures.If that is so (and I admit that my belief is based on a fairly shaky foundation!) then it is hardly surprising that it isn't the mother-tongue of many people - more surprising that it is as many as 8%. (How many people speak Esperanto as a first language?)

I don't know about the lingua franca thing, but it is the mother tongue of Ismail Noormohamed Abdul Rehman (aka Merchant), born in Bombay, so it has a long reach. Apparently, the preservation of Urdu culture and literature is an abiding passion of Mr Rehman, and he even made an entire film devoted to the subject (if it were an autobiography he might have called it "Rehmans of Bombay"). It seems somehow unlikely to me that an "Esperanto" would develop such a culture, though not impossible.

unlikely to me that an "Esperanto" would develop such a culture, though not impossible.

True enough, sjm. However, as an example of the possibility, the Nigerians have taken Pidgin - a language developed by the white rulers so that their "servants" could understand enough to serve, but not enough to really know what was going on - and turned it into a very vibrant language, with its own newspapers, books, song-lyrics and slang.

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